_
In modern terms, if one in six has concealed carry training and
license and practice, that is enough.
Oregon
and Our Post-Constitutional Republic
pjmedia.com
[Oct. 8, '15] by Andrew C. McCarthy [/] http://j.mp/0FreeInArms
or
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2015/10/08/oregon-and-our-post-constitutional-republic/?singlepage=true
Are
you embarrassed by the reasons why we have the right to keep and bear
firearms? Democrats think you are and, in this, they could not be
more right.
That
is why last week’s mass-murder shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua
Community College has led to the same tired political act we witness
each time a gun tragedy or atrocity occurs: The shooting is
politicized by the Left to advance gun restrictions; the timely and
false suggestion is made that gun crime is on the rise (it has
actually decreased dramatically in the last generation); regulatory
proposals are advanced that would have had little or no chance of
preventing the just-occurred shootings; gun-rights advocates point
out the flaws in both the proposals and the premise that guns cause
more violence than they create; and we have a stalemate in the gun
policy debate while ignoring mental illness (the wayward policies on
which contribute more to mass-shootings than does the availability of
firearms).
Why
are we debating policy? After all, gun rights are explicit in the
Second Amendment. In general, there is not supposed to be much policy
debate where our fundamental rights are concerned. We would not, for
example, abide a suggestion that we reconsider whether the government
may break into your home and poke around for evidence without a
warrant. That is not to say there may not be logical reasons to allow
a police officer to act unilaterally on a strong hunch; it is to say
that a constitutional right is supposed to be a guarantee –
something the government has to respect, not something the citizen
has to justify.
So
why is that not the case with guns? When pushes for more regulations
and restrictions come along, as they inevitably do, conservatives and
libertarians counter that these would violate the Constitution. But
the claim is a muted one because the people asserting it are
uncomfortable with (and sometimes uninformed about) the rationale for
the constitutional right. Instead, our gun debate proceeds from the
premise that the federal government is simply trying to protect
Americans from gun violence. Thus, most people reason, the government
deserves a fair hearing because its motive is noble, and it deserves
a degree of deference because, by performing its essential police
functions, it has developed expertise in balancing concerns about
community safety and personal security.
It
all sounds perfectly reasonable … except for being so wrong,
historically speaking. Our Constitution – the debates during its
drafting, the rationale for the Second Amendment – portrays
government as the force to be feared, not heeded.
For
the framers, the central government was the main reason the citizenry
should be armed. They believed nothing more threatened individual
liberty – the value the Constitution most promotes – than an
all-powerful central government. Consequently, they prohibited
Congress from providing for a standing army for more than two years’
duration. Standing armies, they calculated, can be turned against
free people by an abusive government, leading to tyranny.
Obviously,
if the country were not to have a standing army, that would encourage
other countries to attack and conquer it. At that point, Congress’s
power to raise an army would be cold comfort since the conquest might
already be accomplished. The framers addressed this problem by
encouraging the citizenry to remain armed. That way, each state would
continue to have a militia that could defend the state but also could
be pressed into the service of the nation if a threat or exigency
required it – thus protecting the whole country while a national
army was being raised.
Meanwhile,
citizens would maintain the right to protect themselves. Since the
framers and American culture regarded state power as primarily a
threat to liberty, not the ultimate guardian of liberty, they would
have rejected the notion that citizens should completely delegate to
state police the obligation of protecting citizens from crime. The
reasoning here is not along the lines of the public policy quip that
“when every second counts, the police are only minutes away.” It
is illustrative of the conceit that there was as much cause to fear
the state’s use-of-force capabilities as to take comfort in them.
Do
Americans still believe these things? I don’t think so. Americans
do not exactly like government, but most do not see it as a forcible
threat to liberty. Unlike eighteenth century Americans, we moderns
tend to assume our liberty as a given, not as something we need to
fight for – especially against our own government. We have lower
expectations about liberty: we concede the government a wide berth to
regulate our lives; we tend to see even burdensome regulation as a
nuisance, not an existential threat.
Moreover,
we tend to appreciate rather than dread our police forces (movements
like Black Lives Matter notwithstanding). And given that many of us
live in dense metropolises, we seem to assume that the visible
presence and activity of sizable state and municipal police forces
are adequate to discourage crime and keep us reasonably safe. Many of
us do not own guns – we’ve grown comfortable with delegating the
duty of safeguarding ourselves to the government. Many Americans are
more fearful of the prospect of armed private citizens than armed
police officers.
My
point here is not to judge whether these assumptions and beliefs are
right or wrong. It is to acknowledge that they are the ingrained in
most Americans – including most Americans who support private gun
rights.
The
Left grasps this. And while leftists don’t have much sense of humor
about themselves, they fully understand the power of ridicule. When
they hear a vigorous claim that, “You can’t take away my guns
because the Constitution guarantees my right to them,” they are apt
to snicker, “Yeah, because you just might have to shoot at the
invading U.S. army when the government declares a police state,
right?”
Few
people are willing to answer that mocking question with, “Well,
yes, that’s right.” People who frame government as the perilous
threat rather than the admirable “public servant” are lampooned
as nutters by the media and many of their fellow citizens.
Whether
they should or shouldn’t be is beside the point. What matters is
that you cannot make a compelling constitutional claim about gun
rights unless you believe in the Constitution’s rationale for those
rights. By and large, the public lacks that conviction … and that
is why our debate is about struggling to limit the Left’s antigun
agenda rather than asserting our own gun rights.
Full
Disclosure.
_
I understand that the U.S. Militia has been defined in federal law as
all males of military age.
_
The Second Amendment is the ultimate protection, established as a God
given right, against tyranny and lawlessness at any level,
particularly at the central level.
_
In response to the terrorism of John Brown and his associates and
impending federal tyranny, the intensified organization and training
of militias in several states was entirely proper.
_
Concealed carry by women is necessitated by the particular evils of
our times.
_
Open carry by women is a symbol of response to extreme lawlessness
and distrust.
I2C
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